Is Self-Custody Over?

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Onramp Bitcoin Media – “Is Self-Custody Over?”

Date: August 6, 2026
Host(s): Onramp Bitcoin Media team (Jackson, Michael, Nick, Brian)
Main Theme: The fallout from the Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability, the challenges and future of Bitcoin self-custody, and the evolving security and macro landscape in a world shaped by AI and shifting financial power.

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Episode Overview

This episode grapples with the repercussions of the recently exposed Coldcard hardware wallet vulnerability—a seismic event that has shaken the foundational belief in “not your keys, not your coins.” The hosts explore whether self-custody in Bitcoin is fundamentally broken, compare it to past industry crises, and discuss the necessary evolution of security practices in light of accelerating AI threats and growing macroeconomic uncertainty. The episode tackles trade-offs, offers practical advice, and assesses future industry directions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Coldcard Vulnerability: What Happened and Why It Matters

[03:22]

• The Coldcard hardware wallet, long considered one of the safest self-custody devices, was found to have a critical vulnerability affecting MK3 and some MK4 models.
• Impact:
  • Nearly a million Bitcoin addresses moved on July 31—the busiest day since 2024.
  • Small holders moved as much coin as during the FTX collapse (2022).
  • Many did “everything right” per industry best practices but still lost life savings ([00:00], [06:11], [10:22]).
• Quote:
  “The brutal irony of this situation is that... people had those learnings on the centralized custody side that persuaded them to do some form of self custody. And then a similar end result ended up happening...” —A [00:00]

2. Irony and the Single Point of Failure

[10:22]

• The industry taught against centralized risk, yet the Coldcard bug exposed a single-vendor vulnerability on the “decentralized” side.
• Both Mount Gox/FTX (centralized) and Coldcard (self-custody) failures stem from centralized points of failure.
• Calls for the need to “minimize the attack surface and add redundancy” to any custody setup; trust nothing and verify everything.

3. Psychological & Community Impact

[06:11]

• The incident triggered widespread anxiety, survivor’s guilt, and sleeplessness among Bitcoiners—even those not directly affected ([06:11], [11:00]).
• Quote:
  “Our people are wrecked, even those of us who weren’t explicitly wrecked by the exploit.” —Reading from Hodl, via C [06:00]

4. Caution Against Abandoning Self-Custody for ETFs

[11:30], [19:58]

• Immediate response has been an inflow of coins to exchanges. Some in the press, like Bloomberg and mainstream outlets, argue this bolsters the case for ETFs and centralized custody.
• Hosts strongly resist this narrative:
  • Bitcoin’s value is rooted in decentralization.
  • Centralizing assets with large custodians only creates a bigger honeypot and new risks (“honey pot in a larger attack vector from AI, physical, social engineering...”) —C [06:11]

5. The Call for Better Solutions: Multi-Institution Custody

[12:49]

• Proposes multi-institution custody as the only scalable and end-user-friendly path forward.
• Analogies to the evolution of Macs—users want a “just works” solution, not endless technical tinkering or purity tests.
• Criticizes the “hobbyist” mindset and calls for professional-grade onboarding and security practices to drive mass adoption.

6. Mainstream & Media Narrative Impact

[17:43]

• Bloomberg and others report this as the “death” of self-custody, reinforcing FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and old narratives of Bitcoin as “too risky.”
• Hosts argue the solution isn’t ETF migration—but demand for better tools, education, and a renewed focus on core principles.

7. Red Team, AI, and the Security Arms Race

[29:44], [30:39]

• Bitcoin Red Team: 16-person global team auditing hundreds of codebases, uncovering thousands of security findings.
• AI’s role in Coldcard exploit: Likely uncovered by the open-source Kimi3 AI model, amplifying concerns over both security and transparency.
• Quote:
  “It seems at least allegedly that an AI model, likely Kimi3, was used to identify that bug.” —A [30:39]
• The arms race is just beginning—open vs. closed models, AI as both an attacker and a defense tool.

8. Social Engineering & AI Threats

[48:36] onward

• Discusses documented AI social engineering attacks (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mythos 5), with agents creating fake identities to pressure maintainers into approving malicious code.
• “This is absolutely insane... this is only getting started... The droids are doing [social engineering], and it’s only going to accelerate from here.” —C [49:38]
• Security can no longer be treated as a “set and forget” practice.

9. Analogies and Mindset Shifts

[43:51], [46:50]

• “Would you rather live with no rules—or a town with rule of law, police, ambulance, etc.?” Multi-institution custody creates safety and redundancy for the mainstream, with opt-in sovereignty as needed.
• “Self-custody” is not “dead,” but it must become more robust, accessible, and realistic for a global population.

10. Macro Segment: Gold, Treasuries, National Security and the Global AI Race

[57:13]

• Reserves paradigm shifting: nations like South Korea moving from U.S. Treasuries to spot gold; concerns over U.S. weaponization of treasuries.
• Mexico’s pivot: exporting AI servers more than cars, underscoring the geopolitical race for AI leadership and critical infrastructure.
• “All sovereigns are... chasing spot commodity that can’t be debased... Eventually, it’ll leak into Bitcoin. It’s just a rational order.” —C [62:47]

11. Everyday Fiat Dysfunction and Societal Decay

[65:28], [68:33]

• Rising prices for household goods—fridges, MacBooks, couches—everything is now financed, while mass-market trends like “live shopping” (real-time shopping/gambling platforms) show the casino-ization of the consumer economy.
• Memorable quote:
  “Everything is moving into casino economy... No one cares about bitcoin. This is where most people end up.” —B [67:27]
• Highlights the need for robust, user-friendly, inheritance-ready Bitcoin custody as a path to peace of mind amid chaos.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “The brutal irony of this situation is that... people had those learnings on the centralized custody side that persuaded them to do some form of self custody. And then a similar end result ended up happening...” —A [00:00]
• “Our people are wrecked, even those of us who weren’t explicitly wrecked by the exploit.” —from Hodl, read by C [06:00]
• “The answer... is not to go to Coinbase and ETFs. It breaks down from first principles... If you’re going to centralize the asset, you’re putting a greater honey pot in a larger attack vector from AI, physical, social engineering.” —C [06:11]
• “...need to build in redundancy and fault tolerance to any, any custody setup... you have to assume that everything’s fallible, whether it’s Coinbase, whether it’s a hardware device.” —A [10:22]
• “If you want everyone to roll their dice and geographically distribute hardware devices and seed phrases, that’s fine—but then you can’t also simultaneously believe that most people will ever own Bitcoin.” —B [42:31]
• “There’s no perfect solution. There’s only a set of trade-offs.” —A [46:50]
• “We’ve been in this hobbyist industry and there’s a bunch of people that never built products or never worked with people on custody and they just developed all these insane things and think the market’s going to do it. That’s just not how it’s going to work.” —C [43:51]
• On AI’s threat:
  “The droids are doing [social engineering], and it’s only going to accelerate from here, and things are going to get a lot more weirder, and everyone just needs to be vigilant.” —C [49:38]
• “All sovereigns are... chasing spot commodity that can’t be debased... Eventually it’ll leak into Bitcoin.” —C [62:47]
• Summing up client sentiment:
  “Secure your clients funds. This is your mandate. I made the deposit that I did as a direct consequence of a truly unbelievable hack on what was supposed to be premier cold storage device line available... I just need my sats to be safe.” —client email, read by C [69:51]

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Important Segments & Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |------------------------------------------------|-------------------------| | Coldcard vulnerability explainer | 03:22 – 06:11 | | The psychology of community fallout | 06:11 – 10:22 | | Irony: centralization and single points of failure | 10:22 – 12:49 | | Multi-institution custody & industry solutions | 12:49 – 17:43 | | Media FUD & mainstream narrative impact | 17:43 – 24:02 | | Red Team & AI threat to codebases | 29:44 – 36:14 | | Social engineering, AI, and next-level hacks | 48:36 – 54:16 | | Macro view: Gold, USTs, global competition | 57:13 – 65:16 | | Everyday fiat dysfunctions | 65:28 – 69:51 | | Final thoughts & client testimony | 69:51 – end |

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Conclusion & Actionable Takeaways

• Self-custody is wounded but not dead:
  The answer is not to shift en masse to centralized custodians or ETFs, but to build more robust, user-friendly, and redundant solutions for a world where all forms of trust are being tested and where “attack surfaces” evolve rapidly in the AI era.
• Trade-offs are inevitable; peace of mind is the product:
  Ultimately, Bitcoin security will require a blend of sovereignty, trusted networks, and realistic user experience—“the Mac, not the Linux terminal.”
• Stay vigilant—this is a new era:
  From AI-enabled exploits to shifting sovereign asset reserve practices, this is a watershed moment demanding humility, collaboration, and a return to first principles.
• Education and client focus:
  The episode closes with a powerful client letter: “I just need my sats to be safe.” The hosts emphasize their commitment to user-centric, multi-institution solutions, inheritance readiness, and ongoing direct support.

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Further Resources

Visit onrampbitcoin.com to schedule a call, get personalized advice, or learn more about their multi-institution custody solutions.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

The like brutal irony of this situation is that, you know, for 17 years the, the learnings and the teachings of Single Point of Failure were predominantly on the centralized custodian side of the house. And this happened on the opposite side effectively where, you know, people, people had those learnings on the centralized custody side that forced them or that persuaded them to sever the Internet connection, do some form of self custody. And then, you know, a similar end result ended up happening. Even though like you said Jackson, like they proverbially did everything right. What you're telling me is that music

[B]

is about to stop and we're going

[A]

to be left holding the biggest bag

[C]

of odorous excrement ever assembled in the

[B]

History of Japanese 1974-1987-9297-2000 and whatever we

[A]

want to call this.

[B]

It's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves.

[A]

I say when we sell.

[C]

Hey.

[A]

Okay. I say when we sell.

[B]

Michael, please just kick us off here. Please apologize for keeping everyone waiting this afternoon.

[C]

I don't know if it was me or producer Nick, but I'm happy to land on the sword. Yeah, we're here. I don't even know if we're back. We're live. We'll see how it goes. You know, insane time in the world, insane time in bitcoin. Hopefully we don't, we don't get canceled. I guess we can get canceled. It's our, it's our pod, it's our channel. We just had an all hands and there's a lot to discuss on status of the market or placing it. But also, you know, a lot of good conversation we're going to discuss here.

[A]

Yeah, Wild week. We'll get into the obvious stuff. I think a lot to talk about in terms of what's happened over the past several days and really more than that, it's like, where do we go from here? How do people think about security not only in the bitcoin space, but I think there's a broader discussion around securing data in the world of AI and yeah, good to be live. Michael, you've been wanting to do this for a while and we're finally alive. How does it feel?

[C]

It feels good. I don't necessarily know how we'll interact. Maybe producer Nick if you get open up YouTube and people are leaving comments there or in. I guess that was part of this exercise when we were planning My understanding.

[A]

There's a live chat. There's a live chat on X. So sound off.

[C]

Producer Nick is a Gen X and so it's pretty like, you know, privy to some of these functions.

[B]

He's not Gen X.

[C]

What is it?

[B]

Gen Z. That'll make him like 50 years old.

[C]

Gen Z. And he mentioned that there are some messaging. There's messaging. Messaging functionality on the interwebs that you can comment. And so the core idea, we've been talking about this for a while to make it more interactive and ideally even beforehand. Source comments, thoughts, questions, but we'll see how it goes. But we would appreciate, you know, any like subscribes and then also comments if you want to interact throughout this. We'll see how it goes. We I had a console cam's going to take it because we started a little late. So we can see how long this goes and how interesting it gets. Or maybe it's not that good and we just cut it after 30 minutes and then we'll just go back to work.

[B]

All right, let's get into it today. I would appreciate feedback, positive or negative though. Let us know if you prefer a live stream to a recorded podcast. I don't think it'll change much, but if we can get you guys to interact and get involved, then maybe there's a net benefit. I just don't necessarily want to. I don't want to admit that to Michael. I really don't. But we'll see what happens. So to start off today's conversation, look, a lot has happened in the past week. We recorded a week from today, so Wednesday, just before the cold card vulnerability broke Thursday into the afternoon and evening. We did release an emergency podcast Friday. So we touched on all the information that we had at the time within the first, like call it 12 hours or so, when that vulnerability was started to be exploited, when people are starting to lose funds and when this migration started to happen from cold card devices and really just self custody in general. I think a great place for us to start is just to contextualize how quickly things have moved here because I didn't fully appreciate it until I was just taking a look at the numbers this morning. So on July 31, which is when the news broke, Bitcoin had its most active day since 2024 in terms of movement on the blockchain. So nearly a million addresses moved. Small holders were shifting as much coin as almost the FTX collapse. So you know, as much as back in 2022. And the behavior was different though I think that's the most interesting part about where we're going to kick off Today's conversation is totally different incident. Of course, Ftx's collapse, of course, versus the cold card vulnerability. We're talking about two very different ends of the spectrum. We're talking about shitcoin casino blowing up. A lot of just leverage, a lot of counterparty risk that was assumed there versus what people were doing the right thing, what they were told was the right thing, they were doing the right thing. They were managing their life savings. A lot of people have lost their life savings. A lot of people have managed to escape it. But now the question is, well, where do people go from here? And so there is a lot of movement happening on chain currently. There's still a lot of uncertainty about what is going to happen come of the next days of the next weeks. But what we do know is that about 18000 Bitcoin have moved in the past couple days per Galaxy Research. Alex Thorne, our buddy who heads firmwide research at the firm, and a lot of it has moved to exchanges. So I think I want to first kick off and just say any additional thoughts before we get into. Or any additional thoughts on the vulnerability itself. But more importantly, what are we seeing in terms of the activity? Was this the right call? We have some tweets that we can pull up here. Producer Nick has one from Eric Balchunas talking about how this is going to end up being a NET positive for ETFs for centralized custodians. Is that the right call though? Let's, let's talk about what the implications are for this vulnerability, what it means for the industry and what it means for listeners in terms of protecting their stack.

[C]

Yeah, a few maybe quick hits. One is it goes without saying there's up until last night, you know, have been on Twitter today, but that people are still migrating or able to migrate off MK3s and I think MK4s as this progresses. So if you're listening to this, you should go read some of the articles that have been out. There's no shortage of information. You should move your coins also, you know, we're, we have to just like highlight the gravity of this because real people lost wealth. Last night I was looking at some stuff online and Aaron Hodle, who had the, the brain situation and passed away, you know, he had cold cards that were set up for each of his kids and they were able to save two and one was lost and it just hit home. I don't know if there's something we're going to be able to do there to help, but this is just real money that's lost and I want to share that because it, it pains me personally, deeply. It's why we're building this business. But also I want to highlight like we're going to have a tact of traditional blast trade of, you know, being playful, being upbeat because we have to be, we have to like move on from this. And we have lots of things that we've been building for, for this and we'll come with a commentary but I just don't want to get lost in anybody that we take this stuff insanely seriously but at the same time we have to figure out how to level up. And the last thing I want to say is I just want to pull this up because I feel like this popped in my feed and it's really strange. I was talking about it on the all hands today that I sleep like a baby. A lot of people don't. Oh yeah, a lot of people don't for whatever reason. And I've just always been able to. And the past couple of days I haven't. And this popped up in my feed from Hodl about nobody's sleeping. I was like, what is that? And I won't read the whole thing. But the thing he says is on Survivor's guilt free states and getting your head back after the coal card entry bug. I've been talking to everyone in bitcoin the past six days and I keep having the same conversation. Flat wired, running on three hours of sleep. Our people are wrecked, even those of us who weren't explicitly wrecked by the exploit. And honestly, I haven't had the time to read the rest. But the core point there is that I hadn't been able to put my finger on like just since this happened Thursday, every night has been a few hours because it's just like all the things that you thought about, worst case scenarios, where do we go? I think there's a lot of conversation maybe to answer now to go to the question of like, how do we come back from this and where do we go? I'm confident we will simply because bitcoin rests on that and I'm confident bitcoin will succeed. And also when you look at the notion of antifragility and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and everything's good for bitcoin. Those are all truisms. And I've been pinging separate folks behind the scenes that are notable in the space that maybe shilled, maybe didn't coal cards. It's like, look, everyone's a big boy. Everyone has to pick themselves up. There was mistakes made by the end of the day we all got complacent, we got complacent on the DAT conversation. We didn't paint a picture on how Bitcoin succeeds to be money without going through debts. And that's on us. In the same way we got complacent with not going harder on painting the picture, providing tools and solutions and narratives on how do people preserve their wealth in digital age when AI is going to be proliferating, the price is going to increase, people are going to get more desperate and they're going to come to people's homes. We've done our best, but it still isn't good enough and we're going to get better there. But the answer to your question is not to go to Coinbase and ETFs. And it breaks down from first principles on the value of Bitcoin is directly tied to the fact of its decentralization, whether it's nodes or the amount of Bitcoin. And then from first principles, it doesn't make any sense to take a decentralized asset and park it with a central custodian and think that it'll have value and persist in the future. The whole idea is paradoxical. If you're going to centralize the asset, you're effectively putting a greater honey pot in a larger attack vector from AI, physical, social engineering. That when it happens, it's the whole notion of just pushing out the volatility. It looks like it's not volatile, but eventually when it is, it's much greater. And so it's not the answer. We'll talk more about it, but that's kind of a long winded response for the first live question.

[A]

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's all well stated. Maybe to sort of tie a couple of things that both of you said together. Jackson, when you reference, like these are two very different incidents when you think about an FTX or Mount GOX versus a vulnerability on a hardware device. They are different, but in many ways they are the same in that there is a single point of failure. Right? It's something that we've talked about for years. In the case of Coldcard, there was a single vendor risk, single vendor vulnerability that caused people to lose funds. And what we've historically seen in the space is these centralized custodians, which are single points of failure, single entity risk. Right? Like even if they're using multisig, like Coinbase does for their cold storage, they're not infallible as an entity. Right. And so the brutal irony of this situation is that for 17 years, the learnings and the teachings of single point of failure were predominantly on the centralized custodian side of the house. And this happened on the opposite side, effectively where people had those learnings on the centralized custody side that forced them or that persuaded them to sever the Internet connection, do some form of self custody. And then a similar end result ended up happening, even though, like you said, Jackson, they proverbially did everything right. And so I think that's the brutal irony of this situation because just from a Numbers perspective, yes, 2000 Bitcoin loss is material, but on the centralized exchange side we've seen much larger magnitude of losses or hacks. And so I think it hits different obviously because of what I'm describing here. But I would say the underpinning is similar in that there's single entities, single vendor risks. That is what we as an industry need to come to terms with or come to grips with. It's like, first of all, there's trade offs with every solution. Nothing's perfect. But what you need to try to do is minimize the attack surface and also add redundancy because basically at this point of the game, and we'll get into some of the AI stuff and how that was a factor here, to a certain extent, you have to assume that everything's fallible, whether it's coinbase, whether it's a hardware device. And so you need to build in redundancy and fault tolerance to any, any custody setup. And so I think that's where we need to go. But it's. Yeah, it's a tough spot.

[C]

Yeah. And I think that there's an important construct of thinking about, you know, we're really kind of talking to individuals here in education and market structure because this is there are individuals that hold the vast majority of Bitcoin and those are the individuals trying to help protect their wealth. And we've done this as the beginning of the show. We've talked about the quote unquote plastic devices and got crap for that. We talked about a lot of these things we'll continue to do. And it's really been baked into the history of onboarding thousands of clients, billions of dollars to custody solutions and realizing there had to be a better way. And why I'm calling that out is because ultimately if they stop printing and had fiscal responsibility, we can make the case we don't necessarily need Bitcoin, but we know that's not going to happen. And on the same lens, if Bitcoin works on greed in the same way that if the network is going to work, the greed and self preservation will dictate the direction the market will go, meaning multi institution custody. And the reason why is because you see this centralization. But these are from people that don't understand and hold very small amounts in. Generally speaking, yes, some large holders exist on these firms, but in aggregate, it's more directionally people that just started their experience in the same way at a different level, like they started with a cash app or a DCA purchase, but as their recognition of the asset and understanding the price appreciation and more AI physical social engineering happens, the rational thing for these individuals is going to be to migrate out of these solutions. That is what will happen. And the beauty is there are firms stepping in. We have four custodians today. We have another one coming live by end of year. We're working with a few others that that game theory that makes Bitcoin work is the same thing that will make the other custodians step in. Because the rational thought, When Bitcoin is $250,000 in a lot more bad situations like this occur. Why would any individual leave it at a third party exchange when a better solution exists in the same way? On the alternative side, if we have to go down the long tail of every person having to roll a thousand dice, it's probably a thousand. If you're going to do a 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 and vendor and all the things that are being discussed, it really just misses the force through the trees of like, we need better market structure, we need better recognizability of solutions that just work. An example is a Mac. People don't even know this or recognize it. But the reason why there's no, there's a reason why that there are no viruses or bugs when you go and download or open a Mac. It has certain properties to it and nobody questions that they get the MacBook. It works perfectly. It was always in my mind the only way we were going to get this a thousand millions and then tens of millions and hundreds of millions and billions was you had to have that same experience where if you're going to preserve your wealth, you don't have to know about any of the stuff that people are listening to us and we're on Twitter about. We've been talking about this for three and a half years and we'll continue to. And I think one of the big learnings is we will get others to evangelize with us because there's just this notion that we have to come together versus infighting or not working together of how do you like articulate this? Because that's really where the advantages in like Wall street and Tradfi is. You have this unified experience or unified experience when it comes to marketing and that's where you end up with like sending people down a track that isn't the right path. And we saw this in the bitcoin circles with all the different ways that people were shilling and nobody ever stopped and verified and they just trusted and we just have to get back to the basics and first principles of everything that anybody that got into the space was founded on. Hey everybody, appreciate you tuning in. I wish we were connecting or the topic was a little bit more positive today. It's unfortunate what's going on, but we'll get better, stronger for this. Have had no shortage of conversations consults this morning and the sentiment's positive. People are reaching out. They haven't been directly affected by loss of assets, but they also recognize they've been listening to these podcasts, they've been seeing what we've produced over the past few years and they realize they want to get started. So I'd encourage you, if that's yourself, you don't necessarily have to go through onboarding. It takes only a few minutes. We've simplified the process. We can start accounts with no costs on ramp Finance. All custody solutions come with insurance. But I would really encourage just shooting me an email, included it below or schedule time with our team. We hands down have the best people in this industry. I was specific about when we built this firm. Everyone here has 10 plus years, whether it's in bitcoin, tradfi, risk management, and even if you're not ready to use onramp, you can book a call and just talk through your setup. What you're doing, what you should be doing. Are you at risk? We're here to help. So yeah, I hope you enjoy the rest of the show and look forward to talking with you soon.

[B]

If we were to take a look, Nick, at these next two articles here from Bloomberg. I just want to call these out because this while we're all discussing it on X and within the bitcoin ecosystem and community, it actually is starting to make its way out into the mainstream financial press. And I want to get your guys thoughts on what this coverage means for the industry, what it means for the asset class because you can see here. So this was originally published three days ago. On August 2, hackers hit Bitcoin's safest hiding place in ongoing attacks. So Just as we mentioned. Right. Self custody, it's been the standard for a long time and that not your keys and I coins originated out of the Mount Gox hack over a decade ago. And so it truly is jarring. It truly is devastating. We talked about a lot of people lost a lot of money at a scale not as great as previous incidents on the exchange side, but when you really put it in perspective, again, these are people that had done everything right, protected their wealth. They were not gambling on shitcoins, they were not doing all sort of degenerate leverage trading. And so that's why it really hurts here. And so there was this coverage and then there was another Bloomberg Opinion opinion piece published today as well. Nick, if you could just touch, open that one up as well. And I just want to bring these up because it's, it reinforces that. I don't know if this necessarily makes as big of a splash as some of the other incidents that have happened in this industry, in the broader crypto industry, but I am curious if this is going to be something that you think you know. Brian. Michael, is this something that you think will resolve in a matter of weeks? Is it months? Michael, you talked a little bit about kind of broader vision, how you see this kind of playing out in the industry. But I'm curious, like in the more immediate future, because this is a timely thing and people are making decisions and they're hopefully not making rush decisions or making decisions while they're exhausted because that's when mistakes are made. But I'm curious, both on the press side, what you think the implications are for Bitcoin, if any, and then also in the shorter term, what do you think of just what people are doing, the actions that are taking. Essentially these articles are making the case that, yes, like self custody, they're not necessarily saying it's dead, but they're saying that this is very damaging to the reputation of how people manage their wealth. And now it really makes a much stronger case, for example, with ETFs.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, this whole article, if, if anybody hasn't seen it, I suggest looking at highlights, basically what we've been talking about for a while now. If you scroll down, Jackson, it shows a physical attack. So it paints that visceral picture of like, do you want to be harmed below or I'm sorry, not Jackson. Nick, it's. Yeah, right there, the crypto hacks and then the physical risk. And then below it it says in True and True. It's true that traditional money has similar flaws. A bank can be robbed at gunpoint, call center scams, but a forgotten pin or fat finger transactions easily resolved by your bank misplaced seed phrases are usually gone for good. And this has always been like paramount to me that I've had this view that bitcoin is not hard to understand. It's pretty straightforward. 21 million people recognize it as valuable. And you can go down the rest of the rabbit hole and realize you know the rest of the on your own volition that the reason why people are so skeptical and antagonistic and everything else adjective you want to provide when you bring this up with friends and family is because of this, these headlines and they will continue. And it's because in the atmosphere, in their mind, when somebody tells you bitcoin is speculative, it's risky, what they're telling you is every time they open up their computer or the news, somebody has taken or lost all of it. It's literally why multi institution was pioneered by us, why we founded this business and why we've been so loud about explaining that there has to be a viable path if Bitcoin is going to succeed. And so this article exemplifies it. But it's just a rational thought like you can't. They tied in this article that in traditional finance and traditional risk management there is no single thing that kills you that takes you out of the game. And in bitcoin that has historically persisted and it was okay in 2012 and 2013 when the price was only $100 and nobody was looking for you or it. But we're in 2026, the game has changed and all the people in the industry are playing a different game. They're sending you plastic devices, they're onboarding you to collaborative miniscript and all these other things that most clients have no idea what they're doing. And we burned the boats. We took a singular focus on multi institution custody. We told you this was the best thing for you, for your family. We, we will add other solutions when the time is right. But how is the market supposed to figure that out when they can't even figure out the one product that everyone told that was perfect and they lost a bunch of funds. The best thing that's happened since we've been running this business has been the text, the emails, the, the calls that we've gotten from clients to know and just sleep with peace of mind that none of this happened to them. I feel the guilt that with Aaron's situation that I think they were looking for something. We told them we can set them up it didn't go anywhere I didn't chase down. And if we did, maybe his other child would still have the bitcoin. Now I still think we can do something on a community side to help there. But the point still stands that we've been articulating this. We have a clear vision of how do we get out of this. But ultimately it's going to be on us and others to paint a different picture of a different path that doesn't require everyone to become some insane security expert and understand covenants and security logic. Like that stuff exists. We do that from a legal perspective. We live in a rule of law. There are technologists and engineers that want to engineer around this and they are right, but they're not right today. And that's how you get paid. Like everyone knows the bookends. We sit here and we're going to go to Global Money.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

That's not the hard part. The hard part is how do you go from plastic device, collaborative custody, etc. Etc. 5 devices, 150 roll dices to I can just onboard, I can get that MacBook, I know it's safe. I don't have to rely on a third party. I have insurance tied into it. I can access financial services. So I don't figure out all this out. It's segregated across the world via jurisdictional, multi jurisdictional collaborative custody. And then this happens and now you have to fly across the world because you have taken time on before your assets are fleeced. We've just been in this hobbyist industry led by hobbyists from a narrative perspective and we have to change that.

[A]

Yeah, very well said. I mean, just as it relates to like coverage like this and it's sort of breaking containment over the past few days into the mainstream press. I think unfortunately, it's just like another sort of signpost that will confirm a lot of people's priors. As you referenced, Michael, if it's not on the centralized custody side of things like the Mt. Gox FTXs of the world, the other sort of boogeyman out there was the proverbial device in the landfill. Right. The classic story from the uk and this is like that on steroids in some sense, because it's not just one person's device that they mismanaged or misplaced and it's now in a landfill and you can't recover it. It's like, no, you know, this wasn't even necessarily any individual's negligence on securing the keys. It was the actual vendor that gave them a false sense of security around, you know, effectively the robustness of their seed phrase. And so it's even worse than that. But I think the net outcome, at least in the near term, is that it confirms people's priors about a lot of this stuff. And I think the, you know, what we had up earlier from Eric Balchunas around, like the movement towards the ETFs, I do think that that is the, the near term knee jerk reaction, but as we've described, it's like it's, it's a different but similar issue. You know, I think if we're sitting here 10 years from now and all the bitcoin that comes into the space of that next decade goes through ETFs, like we're in a pretty bad spot because, you know, I don't even know what the number would be if you're trying to forecast it out, but that would be a lot of bitcoin sitting in Coinbase's coppers. And again, no one is infallible. Like, yes, Coinbase hasn't had like a major security incident, at least to our knowledge, on sort of their cold storage side of the house. But no one's infallible. And particularly in the, you know, this new world that we're in with the age of AI and being able to find these vulnerabilities better than humans, effectively, I think you just, you know, it's a, it's a look in the mirror for the industry in many ways. You know, in part it's, you know, putting faith not only in a vendor but like in influencers. Right? Like someone who's telling you the idiom of don't trust, verify, but then on the back end of that, like no one verified this closely enough, obviously. So it kind of calls into question all of the practices in the space, the idioms, the phrases, and really what you need to get back to is like thinking for yourself, thinking first principles about this stuff. Because clearly putting faith or trust in someone else's knowledge about these things wasn't good enough, at least in this instance.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, this is a core time for everyone, and I'm talking to ourselves as well, to be insanely introspective on how do we level up and become better. I think that there's a lot we can do again on the collaboration and there's a lot of folks that didn't necessarily know about multi institution or on ramp that we can, among other things around security and just always consistent, constantly being adversarial. But I think on the other side, we have to really question narratives from different functions, short, middle and long time frames. One of them is like don't trust. It's like, you know, this notion we had somebody we worked with previously and he would say like that never made any sense to me that we're going to go into this world where everyone was holding their money on them because we live in trust networks. And his analogy was innocent, but it just always stuck with me. It's like we don't test our food every time we go and eat somewhere. Like we have trust networks that are built. And so just that simple notion. Yes. Like don't trust verify. It's a good meme. But I think like part of all of that is also looking to your point on the source of information because we've been in this hobbyist industry that what worked or what got somebody in early and how they thought about it. I experienced this back in the day working on self custody products. It wasn't until taking a step out of that circle, getting out of that kind of like bubble and that you start to realize, oh my God, like this is not the real world. And if we're going to get this to scale, we have to really deliver solutions and messaging that can stay tied to the principles, but also bring in the rest of individuals. And so I just think, and I think it's funny and I think it's ironic that the same people that shipped and productized all these like cold storage solutions now have a different solution that people are going to just instantly jump into. Some will be good, but I think there's just taking a step back and questioning like what if my assumptions and how my frame of reference and mental model of this asset and how it's going to actually monetize and persist in the future need to be rethought. And it could have been a better time with the back to the basic stuff we were running on because that's really what we have to get to is just like back to the basics. When you understand money, you understand it needs to be decentralized. It's going to come from the bottoms up if it's going to work properly for four generations.

[B]

Yeah, but just real quick on the back to the basics, Michael, what is it exactly? Just for people who are tuning in right now. And then I want to get to some of the Red Team updates because it's important just to share where things are today beyond the initial breach and vulnerability.

[C]

Yeah, I mean at the highest level, Back to basics was predicated on a lot of the noise Moving outside of core Bitcoin. And how do you buy it? How do you secure it? And so we had rolled out initiative to start the summer that basically had the ability for people to set up an account with onramp, zero cost DCA at zero cost, spot buys, 50% off. And then even before this we understood that sometimes our pricing might be a barrier. So we lowered the ability just to get into multi institution for $100 a month and that'll run till the end of the year. Still have some gradually and suddenly signed books we're sending for folks that use the GTS basics code so they can get access to that.

[B]

All right, cool. So yeah, I think we covered that pretty extensively. So I want to just provide an Update here from Kali BTC. So Bitcoin Red Team update. We've grown to 16 globally distributed people working 24 7. We're running a large scale ecosystem security audit across Bitcoin code bases. 27 and a half hours in, we filed nearly 5,000 findings across 390 products, 85 critical and 635 high severity issues. So this is. And then 2.31 high in critical findings per person per hour. So Ryan, maybe I give it to you just to kind of like put this in layman's terms. What does it mean? What, you know, we talked, I think we covered it very well in terms of, all right, what happened initially, what's happened in the first few days here as it relates to cold car, but now, what is like the Red Team actually working on? What does it mean for people? What are all these vulnerabilities that are being uncovered? What, you know, what are the implications here?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, so I think there's a few different things here. I mean, one, just going back to the actual cold card incident and the specific bug that was present there. I think it's worth calling out that, yes, it seems at least allegedly that an AI model, likely Kimi3 was used to identify that bug. But in terms of actually exploiting it, at least on the MK3s, there wasn't like a ton of compute necessary to actually search through the sort of field of possible seed phrases or private keys that basically those devices were working from. And so while, yes, this is an AI story, I think that one incident is sort of a jumping off point to something that's larger. And I think now what's happening is people are recognizing like maybe we haven't been as vigilant across code bases, not just in bitcoin, but really broadly. I think this is something that's probably happening as we speak outside of the bitcoin space as well. But it also reminds me of like, you know, a week or two ago when we were talking about the, you know, the OpenAI hugging face incident where the frontier model gets out of the sandbox and then in order to actually, like, stop it or find out what was happening, they had to go and use an open source model. They actually tried to use the frontier closed model and it said like, you know, it stopped them, they couldn't use it. And so we're seeing the exact same thing happen here where if you try to do what the red team is doing right now in terms of surveying all these code bases, you get worse results, seemingly, if you're using the more closed frontier models, whether it's Claude or OpenAI. And so what they're doing is they're largely using Kimik 3 and other open models to actually go about this. And I think there's a broader discussion around, well, what does that mean for, you know, security defenses in general? If, in order to do this type of work, people need to go outside the bounds of US frontier models? I think that's kind of a separate discussion, but I think this is extremely healthy. Like, if we want to find silver linings of this entire thing, you know, this is, this is certainly one of them that I think there's consensus that we just need to be more vigilant around this stuff and there's active work being done to do that.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think this ties into this will continue. We'll see how long the grinding down into the different cold cards and how far via the passphrases, and that may go on for a while. But I do think that the narrative and vulnerabilities will continue, specifically in Bitcoin, because when you think about funding and operational excellence, like, we're still in a very small industry and there's only a certain segment of individuals that have come in at the level that you would need to really think. I don't want to say adversarially, but it's just from like an operational security, engineering, security perspective. So I think that it's good. I can't imagine what's going on behind the scenes when they're finding things out and having people patch, but I don't necessarily know if you'll find everything. And so I just think that this is going to change the whole atmosphere of, like, people associating risk with their holdings and then questioning the other aspect, which is the broader theme we talked about. Earlier in the week and things we've just been sharing for, for months now about AI has only continued to accelerate. And this was part of my personal anecdote because for anybody that's listening, our clients that we've always said if you're a sophisticated client, a rational thing is that barbell approach where you can have that metaphorical bar of gold and self custody. I like to always have that. But the reality is majority of my wealth sits in our platform because I know that my wife can get it, et cetera, et cetera. Point being is when this was all going down, I thought it was okay, I had a passphrase. I couldn't even remember if it was a cold card or the passport that I generated to see. But when I was making this drive, it just, I was on Twitter and it kept, you know, more and more losses, more and more progression of what was happening, that a switch got to the back and move those assets. But I like was thinking, well you know, I want some in self custody. But then I just literally from an individual personal perspective was like, well where do I go? And then if a new model is coming out and there's some stuff we'll talk about with other sandboxes that were, you know, manipulated on the anthropic side, if this continues, new projects are distilled and you open source tooling without this, the guardrails that bad actors are going to have, who is to say that ledger or treasure. Now everything we know says that it isn't. So I'm not throwing fun, I'm not saying that they're infiltrated, but how am I supposed to know if like cold card was the version? And then so I just like, I just think that this is going to just be a huge narrative battle moving forward. And if you think people at 60k are worried and moving in droves with that on chain action, what happens at 120k?

[B]

Yeah, maybe we should. Nick, if you can just, I think skip ahead to. Hopefully you have it somewhere. Not that, I mean I can just read it off. It's not the biggest deal if it's not pulled up. But Michael was alluding it, alluding to it.

[C]

So sorry, before we go there, I do think it's a little valuable. It's part of our, our stick and, and I saw it in the comments if you guys on YouTube, if you, if you can share anything, Brian, it'll give me the leaving off point on just, you know, for the lack of better words, the like what, what's going on with with cold card, coin, kite.

[A]

Yeah, without getting to tinfoil hat, like. And I sort of alluded to this in what I was describing earlier around like the bug. It's this specific bug itself. Like it's genuinely insane to have basically what the firmware did where instead of generating a properly robust seed with enough entropy, it had this fallback where it said it was, it was on but it wasn't working, but it fell back to something that was not nearly secure enough. Like, think about it like you know, multiple galaxies of atoms versus like a football field of atoms. Like that is the difference in terms of the randomness of the seeds that were being generated. And it's completely illogical from like a engineering software development side of things to have something if it's not working the way it's supposed to work, to fall back to something that is silently malicious, meaning, like you can't even verify that it's not random enough. And so there's, you know, various theories online that like, you know, maybe this was a retirement attack where someone knew that this was the way that the, the firmware worked and you know, they were just biding their time until there was enough coin to be able to sweep it in a swift manner. And so, you know, I don't think we can rule out any of that stuff. It doesn't seem like there's any conclusive evidence either way. But it is completely insane to have this be a bug in the software, quote, unquote bug in the software that would default to something that you that is just not nearly random enough. Like it should just not generate a seed if that first order of business is not working or functioning correctly. It should just not generate a seed at all and give you some sort of error that, you know, you can't generate a seed.

[C]

Yeah, I think this really ties into the overarching theme of triangulating information moving forward and not taking anything as gospel, including anything we see, share, sell, etc, there. There's definitely tinfoil hat and for real reasons, I mean just the things coming off the top of my head when you just kind of like paint the picture of those, those Twitter XV scrolls going back to I think it was 21 James O' Byrne who referenced and called out and reached out and they, you know, hand waved it off of like it would have been found to some of the pull requests being tied to some anon, some not. I think there was screenshots in telegram that were shown that people called us out. You know, when you go back to the basic principle of this it's like the device had one job, then you can actually almost get anywhere. But it was supposed to be, you know, built just for this. And the notion that all of these individuals blindly used it, it wasn't tested or checked, just needs to call into question everything and all the recommendations moving forward here. Because there's a, there's really more than technology. This is like a social attack in my mind because God bless, like Zach from Passwords, you know, a lot more gracious than I think a lot of people will be because he got hammered by MBK and others did as well. And you know, whether it was the closed source stuff or just what Seed center was looking at, and even myself, because I didn't. Deep in those weeds, you kind of look like, ah, that's a tinkering project. Well, it looks, at this point, you know, everything's clear in hindsight, but like, that's a better product when you have purpose built. Like there's this notion if you have an attack surface where it's purpose built for seed generation that's in a vector in itself to be infiltrated moving forward, that it just, like it was a vacuum that was created and it continued and that's just a dangerous place to be. And so, yeah, there's definitely something going on. I don't necessarily know what, but I don't necessarily also think that it's just at face value, some kind of like random thing that, that took place when Kimmy came out and, you know, maybe that was a linchpin for it to be found, but there's more to the story.

[A]

Yeah, the only other thing maybe to mention is like, they released a firmware update, I guess, on Friday of last week for the models that were after MK3. And the question from that arises, well, okay, how do you know that that firmware is now doing their RNG properly? It's like, well, oh, we tested it, we now know that it's creating random enough seeds. It's like, well, if you, if you have the ability to do that now, then why was it never tested in the prior firmware? Like, yes, it was saying that it's present in there, but it wasn't generating properly random seeds. So like, if you had the ability to test that, like, why was that never tested? And that's again, like an almost insurmountably conspicuous thing to just have never checked.

[C]

Yeah, and it's an important distinction. While I'm sharing this, producer Nick, if you can pull up how Cloud Fair generates entropy, if you're familiar with that, screenshot with the, the lava lamps. Why I'm bringing that up is because that's where this all goes and that's the component of why I moved my assets over at onramp, but also why I think that yes, self custody will naturally has to exist and without going down that it's the point of this is a moving target of risk. And so today the answer is quote unquote from the experts, two of three multi jurisdictional, multi vendor roll 100 dice. Okay, well x like how many people can do that? But then be like, well, what's the next thing? When whether the price appreciates or we find a vulnerability, the next thing. So, okay, we go to three or five. You see where I' playing this out where this is what the largest firms in the world do. They're generating entropy based on the movement of the encryption keys, of the randomness of this lava lamp ceremony or whatever. Like, you see where I'm going, Like, there's just, we just got to figure this stuff out. And it's not, you know, rolling dice.

[B]

That's what I have behind me and that's why I use a virtual background.

[A]

Just because I don't have a wall of lava lands.

[B]

Yeah, no, but I think it's, I think it's a fair point because people need to make a decision where, you know, you could, you could make a position. All right, I expect everyone to be a self sovereign individual. I want everyone to roll their dice. I want everyone to geographically distribute their hardware devices and their seed phrases. That's fine if that's your position, but then you can't also simultaneously believe that most people ever own Bitcoin. Right. And so I think there needs at least needs to be a recognition that we want to broaden out adoption. We want more people to own bitcoin. We want people to be able to protect their life savings and do so securely. And it is unfortunate that circuit that we find ourselves in the circumstances today that the best solution a lot of people come up with are these things that are totally untenable for most people. And then people will tell me, oh, you know, well, it's really not that hard to self custody. It's really not that hard to memorize 24 words. And if you literally take that at face value, you're right. It's, you know, it's not that hard to memorize words. But it is a lot harder if you have your family's life savings parked in this and you're one mistake away from, you know, getting knocked in the head Having an accident, passing away, accessing financial services, something doesn't even need to happen to you. How do you actually operate in a world with your Bitcoin if that's your best solution. So I think people need to pick and choose in terms of where they think things go from here.

[C]

I'm gonna do a risky analogy, I'm gonna go with it is and we're gonna do more writings and Brian is our resident savant, chief strategy officer. So he'll help, he helps formulate the thoughts and distill them. But I think that there's an important function of we're gonna grow as an industry and self custody is going to get more robust and there's going to be better tooling for that. But at the same time the vision or the way I think about it is like imagine you have a town, you're. You're trying to. What would you like? Would you like no rules but any. So you have all optionality in what you want. Or do you want a town with rule of law, police, ambulance, et cetera, et cetera. And they come with trade offs. But the reality is most people want the latter, not the former. Now if you take that further and use this analogy, it's like that's what multi institutions, that's honor best trusted networks. That's as this market grows. Now if you take that further out as you get comfortable, that's how you build a society, how you establish trust and you establish security, you gain confidence, you grow, you raise families and then you decide in what percentage do I want to take ownership of quote unquote sovereignty and security in my own hands. And that's taking firearms into your home, that is training yourself and training your family. But with the firearm it takes a level of responsibility in practice and vigilance because most people know and they do this, they buy the gun, don't touch it and they're afraid to touch it or when they need it, they need it most, they don't even remember if it was loaded, let alone if you know how to use it or if they're prepared to use it. And so that angle relates here where people will get comfortable and then they will learn about these tools and maybe it's the solutions will adopt how you can participate in the quorum. But we're not there yet. And again I'm not saying that it means that somebody shouldn't hold their assets. It's just the whole point of are we really going to further all this if we tell everyone to put all the bitcoin on a plastic device and then hope like we already are past that, but we still have to construct the right viewpoints for people to understand. Because I think that's the thing again, going back to the beginning we can be better at is we haven't painted a picture of how we get to the other side. And people need to latch on and have an anchor point or they will effectively default to either what the stat wo is or what people that have no idea what they're doing telling them. Because that's the core of what's happened here is we're in a hobbyist industry and there's a bunch of people that never built products or never worked with people on custody and they just developed all these insane things and think the market's going to do it. That's just not how it's going to work. And why I feel confident saying that is because I've lived in both worlds in the traditional tech world on large scale commercialization and then I was helping build on chain and I saw these things firsthand. And so I can stand here and tell you that we have the best model on the planet Earth. And I think this is how bitcoin or I know how bitcoin will scale if it's going to be successful because ultimately it's rooted in like what the hell is the thing that will allow grandma to use it as well as people that hold thousands of bitcoin.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, it's very well said. I think another way to frame it is just like there is no perfect solution. There's only a set of trade offs. And I think you have to try to minimize the attack surface, add redundancy and fault tolerance. And also, you know, if I want to pick out another silver lining of, of this incident, it's that I think, you know, I think we're going to get past this sort of era of bitcoin where there were these purity tests and these lines of dogmatic thinking around how you had to own the asset when in reality, like, sure, if you just want this to be this small niche thing forever, then you know, have that stance. But like the reality on the ground is that every person on earth has a problem in terms of storing wealth. And it's even more egregious outside the United States, outside of having access to the US dollar, which is the best of a bad bunch of fiat currencies. But everyone has this problem. And so I think what we've always said is you have to meet people where they are in terms of their willingness to accept certain trade offs. And so if we want this industry to grow and this asset to flourish and to actually allow people to solve this problem, there have to be more solutions, more robust solutions. And the answer is not just shepherding people into an etf, because then you don't actually own Bitcoin and you don't maintain that optionality to do what you described, Michael, to. At some point maybe you have a barbell approach or you take some amount of sovereignty over a portion of your assets, you have to maintain that optionality. And so you need a solution that still gives you that without fully ceding it to the system and having a paper claim effectively. Yeah.

[B]

Can we talk a little bit about these other security incidents? And then I really think in the interest of time, we should talk about some of the other topics on the macro side as well. So just real quick, if you guys have anything notable that you want to cover here. So OpenAI and Anthropic have both posted about an overlapping cyber incident involving GPT 5.6 SOL and Mythos 5 during an evaluation by UK AISI. And I will quote, in the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering creating fake online identities and using them to pressure to. To pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code. So you have agents, you know, old news in terms of agents wanting to just insert malicious code into projects. But at least I'm not aware of too many other previous incidents where you have agents that are engaging in social engineering. So that's a new level of agenc malicious behavior. So what do you guys think about that?

[C]

I mean, I know internally, you know, you guys probably thought I've been hyperbolic, but for the past probably month I've been saying we're in the middle of the singularity and I don't know, like this is exactly what it feels like. This is absolutely insane. And this is only getting started. Like the whole notion to have the conscious behavior. Because you think about social engineering, that's what we see a lot. You know, this notion of like pig butchering and it's somebody that establishes a relationship, they're overseas, they pretend to be some kind of individual, they find the person that is lonely, they're able to get really close with them, et cetera, et cetera, withdraw funds. It doesn't have to be related to Bitcoin. It can be related to Anything point being is like, this is what the. The droids are doing, and it's only going to accelerate from here, and things are going to get a lot more weirder, and everyone just needs to be vigilant. But also understand, like, this is where it's going from an individual perspective when it comes to managing their personal, you know, finances. And how do you log into your bank account? How do you manage building and thinking about your professional life all the way to how do you think about building your bitcoin custody plan? Because this stuff is only going to accelerate. And Bitcoin has always been the canary in the coal mine. Across all markets we've seen this energy is the easy example where it was the wildcatters out there looking for the cheapest sources of energy. They were creating the, you know, chicken shacks that were, you know, duct taping, what is it called, shipping containers to natural gas. And then all the big boys came in because they needed that cheaper energy. And they can get a higher dollar per token by, you know, tying into gpus. And so the same thing is happening here where the. What's the first thing if you were going to attack? I mean, obviously this is a different circumstance, but going back to the last conversation is like Bitcoin's this digital bearer asset. Well, that's the first thing people are going to try to get to because you can get to it at any part of the world from a computer or basement.

[A]

Yeah, this is terrifying. It kind of reminds me of

[B]

several

[A]

months ago with all the claudebot stuff and, like, the. That Moltbot, like, social network thing where, like, the bots were talking to each other, like they're starting to conspire effectively. I think where this gets really scary is like, okay, so this is an example of Mythos 5 coordinating with GPT 6 soul. But, like, what happens once they start basically accessing their own more open models than these and coordinating in other ways? And so, yeah, I think this is the first instance I've heard of an agent doing some form of social engineering, which that's already such a pervasive problem of humans doing that. To just add that to the list of attack vectors is pretty frightening.

[C]

Yeah, and it comes at a. Like, there's a crazy convergence happening because as a society, we've generally lowered our iq. And so you lower the IQ while you raise the bar of intelligence from an artificial perspective, and you ultimately have people running rampant. We see this already with the boomers and the videos on X, but, like, think about things like this. There's so many people that are not going to even fundamentally understand what's going on, they're just not prepared.

[B]

So in light of everything that is happening with the cold card vulnerability, now is really a great time to reassess your bitcoin custody setup your inheritance plan. How are you managing your bitcoin wealth for yourself, your family for the long term? We have been having calls, emails, texts nonstop since this news broke just a week ago and we are here to help you. We have reduced our multi institution cost to just a hundred dollars a month or a thousand for the year. You can get started with the promo code Big Mike. I mentioned that at the end of the episode, but we'll get you set up with a lower cost multi institution custody. You'll have 50% off all of your bitcoin purchases. You can also get a free IRA account if you'd like as well. Really, I want to just emphasize the fact that we want to be there to help you. Now time is of the essence, especially if you're on a cold card. You have to get off even if you're not working with us. You just have to find another place to go. But if you are taking the time to reassess, now is a great time to have that conversation. You can use the promo code Big Mike, like I mentioned can onboard in just a few minutes. You can also reach out to me directly jackson onramp bitcoin.com if you have any questions. I'm more than happy to help. And also with the promo code Big Mike, if you've been listening this far, I'll make sure that I get you some merch shipped out. We also have some signed copies of Parker Lewis gradually then suddenly. So maybe if you mention that in an email to me I can get that out to you as well. All right, enjoy the rest of the episode.

[A]

Breaking inactive NPM supply chain attack has compromised at least 868 packages carrying over 2 billion monthly installs with the credential stealing worm. It started with the Compromise of the GitHub account of the maintainer behind KV, a library with roughly 127 million weekly npm downloads a pre install hook, fires on NPM install and drops a stealer that sweeps npm, GitHub, AWS, Kubernetes and Vault Secrets and then proceeds to more maintainers.

[C]

Yeah, I mean I think so. This came out I think a day or two ago also came out, I would say in the middle of the situation last week with Coal Card that in Minneapolis or Minnesota as a state Level, I think there was 30 water plants that were infiltrated via some level of hacking from. I don't necessarily even know if they found out who. But I think that the whole point of all this is a lot of this digital security is not prepared for what's coming. And we saw this firsthand with the. The to tie it back again to the coal card deal is that existed for five years. And it wasn't until somebody got access to frontier level intelligence without the guardrails that they were able to find out. And so it's the same. It's the reason why, if anybody's not familiar, that OpenAI and I think it's a consortium or maybe just anthropic actually with Project glasswing. And glasswing is effectively this notion of giving the frontier intelligence or a subset of the frontier intelligence that they're going to release soon to large entities that could present a national security risk if they were compromised so they can go and harden their technology. And so that core idea is it doesn't matter if that exists or not. The reality is there's so much technology out there that hasn't been audited and so much code that these things are only going to naturally exist because we're in a transition period. And eventually we'll get on the other side and there'll be defense and offense, but right now everything's just up for grabs because this technology and intelligence hasn't been available to everyone.

[A]

Yeah, that was something I said the other day. At least in this, in this moment right now, the vibe I get is that like the bad actors are marginally ahead of the good actors in terms of like shoring, shoring up systems and making sure that there aren't vulnerabilities. It seems like the attack surface is much wider. And if you just think about it from that perspective, like if a bad actor is. Is using up models, leveraging various levels of compute, like I think there is an advantage on, on that side of the house, at least for the. The time being, which is unfortunate. Jackson, are you live?

[B]

Yeah, I'm back now the Clankers are trying to take me down. Clanker world order.

[C]

So we're done with AI. Do you want to do gold macro? Yeah, to end.

[B]

So yeah, let's end. Let's end. There a couple things we can, we can run through. So yeah, we can start here. Nick, go back to Luke's post here. So, Luke, Roman, If UST reserves cannot be sold in a crisis without making said crisis worse by threatening a debt spiral, then USTs are no longer fit for purpose as FF FX reserves. In contrast, earlier this year gold reserves were were sold easily and quickly and decreased escalated the crisis. Let's watch. So if you go over to the next tab Nick, this will tie back into just kind of the sovereign bid playing out across gold in particular and speaks to what Luke is describing where U.S. treasuries have played a prominent role as the underpinning for the global financial system as collateral. But for the past decade plus that position has started to erode and certainly over the past couple of years, not even couple at this point like five, six years post Covid as the debt has significantly ballooned, the deficit spending is uncontrollable. Deficit spending I should say has been pretty much uncontrollable for 50 years. But the scale of it right where you have just like compounding debt, you have interest expense that's outgrowing every other line item on the budget. It's becoming a very visible problem. And so what you're seeing is countries are starting to take their reserves into their own hands and they're looking for a sovereign neutral asset and they're coalescing around gold. So this was interesting because the bank of Korea is restarting physical gold purchases. They haven't purchased gold in 13 years. So this is a pretty significant news item. Gold is only about 1% of their entire 427 billion dollar reserve stockpile. And it's interesting as well in the context of what we've seen play out over the past few days here with Japan and the United States intervening in the yen market to prevent the yen carry trade from blowing out. So I think the main thing to call out here and want to get your guys thoughts is we've been talking about the BRICS nations for several years now and they're moving into gold. They're moving away from Treasuries. It still remains to be seen what nation states will do as it relates to Bitcoin. Of course we got rug pulled here in the US by the Trump administration but it is interesting to see some countries come out of the woodwork. I mean it's a notable news item to not buy any gold for over a decade and start to move allocations there. And it also comes at a time where it's not directly related. Nick, I'm not sure if you have the link up, but there was something I saw quite interesting on this from a sovereign perspective with Mexico. Do you have that one handy where they're really just starting to lean into the AI economy And so I'LL call out a few things here and then we'll get you guys thoughts to round it out. So Mexico is physically connecting itself to the AI economy. For decades, cars were the king of Mexican exports to United States. Today that crown belongs to the servers powering AI data centers. In fact, this year, Mexico supplies 40% of the servers imported by the US almost all assembled to run AI models. So we don't need to run through all of it. But I think it's just interesting to play out, right, this conversation of national security, this conversation of sovereignty, of leading on the frontier, not only as it relates to monetary assets, but also in the context of AI. This is really a global competition and I think a lot of times the conversation remains more narrow scoped on the monetary assets, but doesn't necessarily look into critical resources, doesn't look into where things are developing with data centers and chips, AI, etc.

[C]

Yeah. Oh, go ahead.

[A]

I was going to say maybe just a few things as it relates back to what Groman was talking about and the Treasuries and sort of tying that into what we've seen in terms of the reserve space and countries stacking gold. It's all interrelated in the sense that there's a grand realization that U.S. treasuries have, for a long time and even more acutely right now, have been weaponized by the United States to a certain extent. And the sort of yen intervention late last week is just another example of that. I think the magnitude of that intervention is relatively small. I think it was like 60 billion. And Groman had some other tweets over the past week saying this is foreshadowing of what's to come. Like that's not nearly enough. You'll know it's enough basically when gold and Bitcoin start ripping, because it's basically the cat's out of the bag. We're using US Treasuries as this monetary tool to defend the status of our debt effectively. So in an attempt to basically get Japan not to sell US Treasuries, we're going to help defend their currency. And so it's all interrelated in terms of what we've talked about for years, in terms of this monetary ordering what was hot last summer around the debasement trade. It's all interrelated and being exacerbated in the sense that the ways in which QE proverbially happens just shift over time. The bank bailouts look different than yen intervention, but the end result or the output of it is all the same in terms of the debasement of the currency and effectively monetizing our debt. And that's really the only path forward for what was typically the Federal Reserve's job. But now it seems like that role of weaponization is moving more towards the treasury and ascent. Even before he took office, he had that interview where he's like, there's a global monetary reordering and I want to be a part of it. And I think we're just seeing certain steps in that direction.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I think this stuff, like to simplify it all comes down to it's a common sense test, not an IQ test. And what I mean by that is let's just go insular as an individual. All your life is made of like productive life is made of inputs and outputs. Your inputs are like, how do you like, well, let's start with your outputs. Your outputs are like, how do you actually produce value? What are your exports? So exports. Exports and imports are another example of it. It's like, what do you export? Right? You export your time, you export your value, and then what do you import? And you're importing levels of ways you protect that value, right? So it can be dollars, you can, you know, use credit, you can buy houses. But at the end of the day, what are the things that you need to keep your family or that household alive? Well, there are core necessities. Those are the commodities that you need. You need food, you need gas, you need energy. Well, that's just how rational it works. And then ultimately, well, what happens if your imports are being debased? Meaning so you've already done all an export of those value and then you're taking in dollars and maybe you're storing some of that in something that eventually somebody is diluting. Well, what is the rational thing to do is to import things that people can't print world. That's effectively what sovereigns have to do. Treasuries had been that because of the petrodollar and other things, whether it's 082000 2020, you could pick whatever line of demarcation that fundamentally has changed. In the same way, the world gets a lot clearer, at least on the AI side when you recognize that all sovereigns are chasing or at least China and US are chasing. ASI is all this stuff becomes clear when there's a race for how do I hold spot commodity that can't be debased. Because as a sovereign, if I have exports that are tied to energy, but I need imports that are tied to food as an example. Well, if I am holding something that is being debased, I can't actually pay for that food. And now what do I do? That's what's effectively being discussed. That's what's happening. And I think it's the most bullish thing for Bitcoin, because if all of these sovereigns are effectively realizing that gold is the store of value, well, it's eventually going to leak into bitcoin. It's not. It's just a rational order. And that's another conversation we've had for the past three years of gold is bullish. Gold running. It should be our friend. We should talk about them as complementary to each other. And so I, I just look at the market. Recognizing sound and hard assets is a insanely positive and bullish catalyst for Bitcoin short, middle and long term.

[B]

Agreed. Do we want to talk about Luke Roman's refrigerator around things out today?

[C]

It sounds like you do. So let's, let's, let's, let's roll it.

[B]

I thought this was one that you brought.

[A]

I think I, I think I added to the list. I mean, it's, it's, you know, along the same track that we're talking about in terms of debasement. And I guess what he's more specifically alluding to here is like the metrics that track these things, we know they're manipulated. We know they basically try to curb the recognition of prices increasing at such a rapid clip. But, you know, eventually it hits a wall where, you know, in this instance, Luke was ordering a new refrigerator, which he had previously had one for 18 years. And the salesperson told him, order it in the next couple of weeks if you want it. Because Whirlpool and Fridge Air are raising prices by 10% across the board at the end of August, which is a pretty material price hike. And so, yeah, I mean, this is just another, another data point in what we know is happening here.

[C]

Yeah. And I think. So this is a great call out because it ties into the previous conversation around being insular and thinking about your own household of like in that world. Well, the things that people will exchange goods for will require, they'll be recognized. Right. Gold, Bitcoin. And so this is the other side of that education of people just don't recognize that if Bitcoin has value that it'll eventually be used for that. And these other assets and proxy assets, whether it's ETFs or DATs, will not be used for that in that world. And so why would you opt for that, especially with the return profile is a different discussion. And I think it came out this past week. It just ties into the. You will own nothing and be happy. It's like people are out there now having to finance MacBooks. Like there used to be a world where you bought something and it lasted for a very long time. You didn't necessarily need to think about upgrading. And I think even MacBooks had historically been there, but now you're just financing the MacBook or the Apple device. We're just going to continue down this path and it's obviously not a good trajectory.

[B]

Yeah, Brian, it comes to mind as well because my wife was doing some furniture shopping like a week or two ago and everything is just insanely more expensive in the past. Even the past year. We obviously know like 5, 10 years of course, but even the past year just like tariffs, just cost of goods increasing the uncertainty in the Middle east now just like. And then to your point, Michael, financing, everything is financing. It's like, oh, you could finance your couch purchase, you could finance the dining room set. I mean it is pretty crazy. It's just the fiat economy on steroids. Maybe that's the last place we could end, Nick, is if we go to the live shopping headline from the Wall Street Journal. I don't even know. I mean I just feel bad for this guy. I really do. Live shopping app where some people bid until they're broke. So I've never been on whatnot. I'm not sure if you guys have either, but just this whole idea behind live shopping. Nick, if you can scroll down a little bit. Story about this individual Sean Harding, who has just like developed seemingly an addiction to live shopping. You know, we talk about prediction markets and gambling.

[A]

Can you define what is live shopping? I'm not familiar.

[B]

Yeah, I mean I don't even fully know what it is but my, my idea or my perception is that it combines like video streaming and like interactive chat. Was shopping. I don't know, I've never done it, I've never been on whatnot. But point being is this guy, and I guess this is, you know, indicative of many other stories, but it ties back into, you know, everything is moving into casino economy, everything is moving into gambling where you have fintechs that just, they promote prediction markets, which is gambling. You have crypto companies that promote shitcoins gambling. And so everyone is just gambling on everything. And everything's finance, everything is financed now. And this guy here, 45 year old accountant, so like seemingly all right, you know, professional, maybe Strong career, spent almost $1.4 million of his personal savings loans and borrowed money from a friends and family from his employer company credit card. I mean I really do feel bad, like I'm laughing, but I really do feel bad just like reading the details of this because it is so indicative. I don't know if this is just a, an addiction thing or it's like really just indicative. Like I don't, you know, people just consume, they gamble. No one has low time preference, no one is thinking about for the long term. No one cares about bitcoin. This is where most people end up.

[C]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's crazy out there. I think we've been doing a lot of brand strategy meetings and there's a delicate balance on how we operate because we speak and we come from the world of folks listening and Twitter. But the reality is that's such a small microcosm of like the rest of the world. And for anybody that didn't listen, Parker Lewis was on Natalie Brunel's podcast Just Masterclass on breaking down the construct of the return profile and just the nonsensical nature of digital asset treasury companies. And one of the things he highlighted and we've heard a lot but he highlighted how I think it was an orthodontist that he met that bought like 80 to 90% of their net worth into one of the DATs. I don't know if I think it might have been microstrategy and they're down 90% and so I think that this is, there's just such a onus and requirement around education and conversation because the thing I wanted to leave with all of it is I had this note without delaying confidence. I'm going to kind of paraphrase but I was telling the guys this was late last night and said thank you for reaching out. Recently updated my account to core to capitalize on back to the basics offer and deposited what for me is a significant satstack. If you want my input it is this secure your clients funds. This is your mandate. Oh, that is your mandate. I made the deposit that I did as a direct consequence of truly unbelievable hack on what was supposed to be premier cold storage device line available. I don't care about fee spreads, how many tabs are on the terminal, etc, I just need my stats to be safe and you know we, we take this with the utmost seriousness and gravity but it really like stopped me in my tracks last night because it just added a level of responsibility and what we're here for and we have to rise the occasion. But I just wanted to read that because I think that that's ties into this of like there's so much noise, there's so much craziness that once people find the solution, they want peace of mind. Because this is not peace of mind. But on the other side of it, if we're going to get past this, we have to be able to give people peace of mind that they can adopt this and be able to preserve it and give it to their family if they pass away, it's not sitting on something that gets hacked and then they have to race to get it. So hopefully that resonates with anybody listening. And if you haven't signed up, want to learn more or just reach out to us, you know, one of the big things we're doing is just talking to folks explaining how to think about risk. And then for our clients we have a bunch of office hours and things we're doing that, you know, they're naturally going to be a little bit more closed in because of the client base. But if you're thinking about being a client, we're going to be running those out in the next couple of days. So if you sign up, we'll reach out over email so you can join.

[A]

Yeah, good for good. Good idea to call that out. And maybe the only other thing is that we're going to be doing more on the referral side. So if you are already a client or someone who wants to just get in touch with us and basically, you know, have a go to place to send friends and family who want to get onboarded to something with, you know, premier security, but without the hassle of managing devices or managing private keys, we can be that destination for you. And happy to hop on a call and talk anybody through it.

[B]

You can shoot me an email direct to jackson onramp bitcoin.com we can have that conversation anytime you'd like. And I think to round things out today, Michael, this was highly, highly anticipated for you. The live stream, the first one you've been pushing, you've been pressing this for months and you finally got what got your way. So are you happy with how it went? Did you enjoy it? I'm sort of feel different for you. Like just how was your first experience?

[C]

I'm so ecstatic. One is we have the best team in the industry and they take leaps of faith with me and, and you know, you got to be, you can't, you can't bat 100, but you got to be right more than You're.

[B]

You're wrong, or it's a thousand. But, you know, clearly this guy's his first fan.

[C]

Can't bet 100, but, like, 100%. But you have to be right more than you're wrong or people will leave. And one of them was like, let's do this. And I've come up with just on the spot, a few ideas to make this interactive. I think one of the big ones is we're gonna have a surprise. I don't want to show it here, but to share with the team. Ideally by next week. Hopefully we can do this for Final Settlement producer Nick, because I think it's just good. But also we're gonna have interaction that it's going to be exciting for people to not only comment, chat, but then also ahead of the show on things we should talk about. And then, yeah, I need to reach out to other folks. So we can. You know, we pumped the numbers up to close to 400 right now, but I think we can get into the thousands weekly. So need to reach out to some of our reinforcements to either join the show or at least retweet because, you know, we're gonna throw the kitchen sink at this. Like, we only get one shot. And I think everyone got a little complacent, and everyone can do what they can do, but we're gonna take matters in our own hand and our own hands and live and die by. And fall on our. Our sword. And so we're just going to get louder and we're going to, you know, talk more about what we've been doing. Anyone's been listening knows that we. We've called a lot of shots, and they've been right, and we're going to continue to do that.

[B]

So just to round things out here. Oh, you guys hear that?

[A]

Yeah. Jesus. You all right, dude?

[C]

That's. That's either a good or bad omen. That's either a good.

[A]

That was crazy.

[B]

The Clankers are coming for me, so I gotta wrap up quickly. Use the promo code Big Mike, if you're gonna sign up for on Ramp. I'm gonna spin. I'm gonna spin up the promo code. Use promo code Big Mike. You'll get everything that we're currently offering with back to the basics. Michael alluded to, you know, zero fee recurring purchases. That's permanent, but you'll get 50 off all your bitcoin purchases, certainly through Labor Day. Perhaps we'll extend it as well. But if you want to cheat, if you want to stack sats while the price is cheap and pay little amount of fees as possible. You can do so on our platform. And then most importantly, in my opinion, multi institution custody. You know, Michael mentioned the mandate that email he got late last night. Secure client assets. We do have a promotion running. It's our lowest rate ever. We've offered for multi institution custody and includes Lloyd's of London insurance. It includes inheritance. Includes access, direct access to me, the team, you know, human support. Always help with anything that you need. So use promo code Big Mike if you're not a client already. And I would love to meet you as well. Reach out jackson@onramp bitcoin.com it takes a few minutes to sign up, by the way. It's a quick process.

[C]

I'm. I'm fine with using Big Mike. I mean, there's a. I feel like if I can embody the Dave Chappelle crackhead meme of how do you get to more of them gradually and suddenly sign books?

[A]

We do have more of them.

[C]

So if you sign up with Big Mike, we will get those over. And there was something else I was going to reference, but we're going to talk. I think we got to get the dates exactly right, but we're going to be doing a more broader virtual roundtable and then we will be. I don't know if it's going to be puppy, we got to talk to Pacquiao. But somewhere in New York, the team will be at the end of the month getting together with folks. And we've got a lot of stuff cooking. So just know that that's coming down. And if you're already interested, you can just leave a note when you sign up or just shoot us an email and we'll add you to the list.

[B]

And I do need to cover my ass as well because I do not have the merch. I cannot ship merch if I don't have it. So everyone who keeps following up with me about getting merch out to you, like, I'll do it, but I need Michael to send me the merch. So take it up with him. Take it up with Big Mike. Use promo code Big Mike.

[C]

Hey, I've seen on Twitter people are getting their graduate and suddenly books and their swag. So it's, it's going. There's just proof of work required. You know, you got to make the shirt. You gotta. We're not. I'm just kidding. We're not making the shirts. But there's a. There's a physical component to this. All right, good stuff, guys.

[A]

Thanks, boys. Adios thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show Notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.